A protester peers through a fence in Bil’in, Palestine, on January 7, 2011. (Photo: IDF)
In this Truthout interview, Ilan Pappé, author of The Biggest Prison on Earth, argues that Israel’s model for the occupied territories is not an eventual two-state solution. Rather, Israel has built a model of a permanent open-air prison for Gaza and the West Bank.
Mark Karlin: Can you provide a succinct argument to refocus the identification of the West Bank and Gaza as open-air prisons and not “occupied territories”?
Ilan Pappé: Not only open air, but at times, and nowadays in Gaza, a maximum-security prison. Recently, the Israeli government officially celebrated the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria. Already in 1967, Judea and Samaria, namely the West Bank, were liberated areas, not territories to be held in custody for the return of a peace agreement, in the eyes of all the Zionist parties, while Gaza was seen as an enclave that had to be always guarded either from within or without.
Thus in 1967, the Israeli government then — and all the successive governments since — regarded the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as territories that had always be under either direct or indirect Israeli rule. The second decision was that the people who live in these territories will not be granted Israeli citizenship, nor were they allowed to have their own sovereignty or independence. They were also not driven out, as were the Palestinians in 1948. So, they were intentionally defined as people without citizen rights and at the mercy of first military rule,…